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Comment by Eridrus | Hacker News Reader

I think there is a real disconnect between what peer review is and what the public seems to think peer review is.

The public seems to think that peer review indicates that something is true, but that's clearly not the case because we have no way of verifying any of the data used, etc.

The paper that got published in a top journal "Human Reaction to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon", while silly, doesn't seem like it has to be rejected if it were an honest paper that actually did the experiments they said they did. It seems no more silly than the lobster nonsense Jordan Peterson peddles and conservatives eat up. I don't personally think it's a useful paper, but most individual papers rarely are, even in CS.

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The methodology section of the article says that one person spent almost an entire year sitting in a dog park for up to seven hours a day (for a total of 1,000 hours). During this time, that person allegedly inspected up to 10,000 dog genitalia, or approximately one every six minutes. Even if the alleged institution was real (which it wasn't - they didn't even put up a website until after the article was submitted), the author had valid credentials (which they didn't), or someone knew of them personally (academia is a small world) there were enough red flags that the reviewers should have questioned the article's validity.

> Even if the alleged institution was real (which it wasn't - they didn't even put up a website until after the article was submitted), the author had valid credentials (which they didn't), or someone knew of them personally (academia is a small world)

Not sure about these journals, but a lot of peer review is blind, so the reviewers do not have access to any of this information intentionally.

You mean this paper by E. A. Kravitz at Harvard Medical School Department of Neurobiology that was published in the Journal of Comparative Physiology in 1999?

Serotonin and aggression: insights gained from a lobster model system and speculations on the role of amine neurons in a complex behavior [pdf]

https://caspar.bgsu.edu/~huberlab/private/KingSolPub.pdf

I wonder if many of the people so acidly contemptuous of Peterson have ever bothered to actually read what he actually writes, or just viscerally react to the hot take media coverage. He's eminently reasonable, not an alt-right troll like Alex Jones or Ben Shapiro.

Peterson was a Harvard professor from 1993–1998 so he was there at the time this paper was being written. Now that he's at Toronto, I'm curious to know how much interaction he has with Geoffrey Hinton. He's made references to research related to the AI embodiment problem, and one of his business partners is Daniel Higgins who was at MIT.

I see him as more of a Ben Carson figure personally (a legitimate expert in his field that often answers questions about things he knows nothing about), but I agree that it's a little disappointing when his critics make fun of something where he's actually knowledgable.

>It seems no more silly than the lobster nonsense Jordan Peterson peddles and conservatives eat up

Actually that's based on real science. It's not social studies...

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